The Three Musketeers

With tireless regularity, management observers the world over point to the Japanese quality culture, and demand emulation of its success.  Today the Japanese call their approach kaizen: meaning continuous quality improvement, and rest it firmly on three legs - quality improvement, quality circles and suggestion schemes.  All three applied together enable an organization to raise quality consciousness to esoteric highs.

Quality improvement, which in practice has frequently meant the methodology of Juran on Quality Improvement (JQI), because of its systematic and detailed approach and inbuilt learning curve, is a management task.  It rarely permits application below the supervisory level.  Quality circles, more popularly known as QC circles, on the other hand are worker oriented teams, with little or nothing for managers to get into.  Suggestion schemes often operate right through the company, although some exclude seniormost management on the grounds that quality improvement suggestions are an integral part of the basic job description at that level.

Worldwide, quality improvement, JQI, is experiencing a tremendous upsurge of interest and practice.  This has been happening more or less since the early ‘80s, which is when major US corporations began to realize that the Japanese threat was real, and many Japanese products were demonstrably superior while being manufactured at very competitive prices.  Japanese companies were also much nimbler in terms of product development, as is evidenced by the proliferation of controls and special features on audio and video equipment that eventually made the end products almost impossible to operate, they were so complex.  Recognizing this the control panels of many of these devices have been redesigned to permit the ‘most frequent’ operations to be one stroke and feedback oriented.

QC, being a worker approach caught the fancy of managers much earlier.  It became a fad in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and many companies in India, aside from elsewhere, took to it.  It unfortunately acquired a bad reputation with both workers and management: the former, because it was perceived (and often implemented) as a management tool and an issue of confrontation, and the latter because the end results were so spotty.

Why has the Japanese experience been different?  MITI (Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry) and JUSE (Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers) figures indicate that there are over a million highly effective quality circles operating in all facets of Japanese industry, and typical Deming Prize winners report an average of three quality improvements implemented each day.  This results in reductions of defect rates by a factor of two every three years, which is why many Japanese corporations no longer measure defect percentages, they talk of defect rates per million and are aiming at switching to measuring defects per billion.

The difference is the process of implementation.  To understand this clearly, analyzing the nature of JQI and QC is necessary.

• Objectives: JQI has the primary objective of quality improvement, with secondary objectives of cost reduction and increased market sensitivity.  QC has the primary objective   of enabling workers to feel involved, tapping their creativity and improving motivational   levels.  Quality improvement is secondary.
• Problems: JQI addresses the ‘vital few’ problems, almost certainly cross-functional in nature, problems critical to the fundamental operations of the company’s processes.  QC looks at the ‘useful many’ problems, necessarily functional and departmental for the simple reason that QC teams are chosen from within departments.
• Teams: JQI teams are defined by the problem.  The functions affected by the nature of the problem must be represented on the JQI team that addresses it.  When the problem has been resolved, the team disbands.  QC teams are fixed, and select problems from within their functional areas.  After working out a problem the same team will select another to tackle.
• Compulsion: JQI team members are virtually defined by the nature of the problem, and their working on the team is mandatory.  QC teams are entirely voluntary and avoiding any form of coercion is an important factor for their success.
• Evaluation: Once JQI is implemented companywide, performance appraisal of managers is closely linked to the quality of their role in the problem solving approach.  For QC members it is critical that the ability to solve problems is linked to performance appraisal.

Having understood these fundamental differences in the philosophy of JQI and QC, a factor in the successful introduction and implementation of QC in corporations emerges.  This is the prior introduction of JQI: if workers are to respond to a methodology that aims to motivate and involve them in developing results for an organization, they must have a clear demonstration that management too is equally involved.  It is all too easy for managers to blame the workforce for poor quality (‘we gave them the best equipment’, ‘workers are lazy’, ‘too many holidays’) when very often management is not only not traversing a path to excellence, it is the chief obstacle on that path.  The most basic principle of JQI, based on years of research and measurement, is that 20 per cent of the problems account for 80 per cent of the poor results, especially avoidable costs.  Most people tend to think this is axiomatic, and then proceed to behave as though the situation can be ignored.

In terms of actual operation, the following charts (plotting management time against hierarchy) illustrate how managements carry out their quality oriented functions in practice, and how an altered perception of these functions can bring about continuous and effective improvement.  In the first graph, time spent on planning increases with seniority, and at the very highest level, amounts to about 1/3rd of the working day.  The rest of the day is spent in controlling quality.  For more junior levels of the hierarchy, control takes up the entire day.  There is no time at all for institutionalizing improvement.  Actually, for traditional organizations, it is virtually impossible to either recognize or address fundamental problems.

The second graph shows the distribution of time and function in kaizen.  Planning is still the function of middle and top management, and occupies around the same time.  At the very top, however, virtually the rest of the time available must be spent on improvement.  Going further down the hierarchy, improvement time and control time share the day, with about equal time being spent at the level of junior supervisors.  The workforce role is principally one of control, but provisions are inbuilt to enable some contribution to improvements.  This is usually through QC and suggestion schemes, while for management all the way to the top, JQI applies.  The quality experience establishes that of all the essential management roles, the most delegable is control of quality.  As systems fall into place the need for senior management to get involved with quality control vanishes.

Historically, this last aspect has been very well understood by Indian companies.  Always ready to delegate quality control, it has been relegated to a middle management job function locked in perpetual battle between production and sales.  When targets are to be met and rewarded, poor old quality can take a back seat, and usually does.  It’s not quite what the Japanese had in mind, though.

The Japanese example of phased introduction of the three musketeers of quality dates back to 1962.  This is when companies who had been working on quality improvement for over 10 years decided to involve workers, and implemented quality circles among other measures.  The response was enthusiastic, in some measure because the workers were beginning to feel left out of the processes that were lifting the ‘Made in Japan’ label out of its preferred obscurity, from a time when that label ensured gimcrackery.  The suggestion scheme evolved a little later.

In India, a few companies have begun to work on kaizen.  Notable among these are Modi Rubber Limited and Mahindra & Mahindra Limited (tractor division), who have both achieved well over 50 per cent worker involvement with reportedly excellent results.  Two companies who are experimenting with QC after successfully getting started with JQI are Voltas Limited and Mukand Limited.  Both incidentally have their plants in east Bombay, an area noted for its militant unionism.  Success here will help to transform that image.